The Perils of Disapproving God

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any
longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things
which are not proper, 29 being filled with all unrighteousness,
wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit,
malice; they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent,
arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31
without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; 32 and
although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice
such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but
also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Paul's teaching about why a society degenerates into
unrestrained, debauched, destructive evil is unlike any analysis
you would read today. One of the reasons for this is that when a
society is sinking into moral decay, one of the traits of that
decay is the inability to see what is happening. The social mind
becomes so defective in the moral decadence that it doesn't have
the categories or the framework to recognize evil for what it
really is.

We do live in such a day. The inability to render sound moral
judgments is evident almost wherever you look. Which makes this
passage of Scripture one of the most relevant and needed texts in
all the Bible for our day - precisely because it seems so foreign.
Today, if something doesn't seem spiritually or morally foreign, it
is probably part of the blind and decadent atmosphere we breathe,
and therefore of no real use to us, no matter how good it makes us
feel.

What we need is a word from outside our defective world and our
depraved thinking. We need a word from God. And we may certainly
expect such a word to be very strange, because we have become
strangers to the reality of God in a very self-absorbed age.

What we have in today's text is a list of twenty-one ways of
sinning or twenty-one kinds of evil. And what I think we should do
is notice, first, why Paul gives us this list and where such evil
comes from. Then we should look at the list itself and ask why it's
here. Then we should ask what the solution is to these kinds of
things.

Where Do these Evils in Verses 29-31 Come From?

So, first, where do the evils listed in verses 29-31 come
from?

It all started back in verse 18 where Paul gave the reason for
why the gospel of the gift of God's righteousness is so desperately
needed. You recall that he said in verse 16 that the gospel is "the
power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew
first and also to the Greek." Why? Verse 17: "For in it the
righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is
written, 'But the righteous shall live by faith.'" In other words:
the gospel is the power of God to save believers because in it God
gives us what we need and could never produce on our own, namely,
his own righteousness. The righteousness that he demands from us he
freely gives to us, if we will trust him. This is the great
Biblical truth of justification by faith.

Then in verse 18 he tells us why this gospel of the gift of
God's righteousness is so desperately needed: "For the wrath of God
is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness
of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." We need the
righteousness of God because it is the only thing that can protect
us from the wrath of God. And we need to be protected from the
wrath of God because we are unrighteous by nature and suppress the
truth of God. By nature we don't like God and we don't want him in
our lives. I tremble just to say it.

The Effects of Suppressing the Truth of God

So what Paul does in the following verses is describe for us the
effects of suppressing the truth of God. He wants us to see all the
evil of the world as a river that flows from this spring. Reject
God, suppress God, distort God, recreate God in your own image to
your own liking, and the effect is worse than we expect. And the
thing that is worse than we expect is that God joins our crusade
against God, as it were, and delivers us into the debasing effects
of our own rebellion against him.

We've seen it three times. In verse 23, we exchange the glory of
God for images, and verse 24 says, "Therefore God gave them over to
the lusts of their hearts." In verse 25, we exchange the truth
about God for a lie, and verse 26 says, "For this reason God gave
them over to degrading passions." And today in verse 28 we see it
again: "They did not see fit to acknowledge God (or literally: they
did not approve to have God in their knowledge), [therefore] God
gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not
proper."

This is what Paul means by the wrath of God being revealed
(verse 18): God's wrath is being revealed against the world, as
human beings all over the world set their affections on other
things more than on God. God's response to this worldwide
disloyalty and treason against our Creator is not, first, to send
us to hell, but to see that we sink into the swamp we have
chosen.

This is what I was referring to at the beginning when I said
that Paul's teaching about why societies often degenerate into
unrestrained, debauched, destructive evil is unlike any analysis
you would read today. Today you might hear someone say: Okay,
America, you have built your bed of secular, God- belittling
relativism and amorality, so now sleep in it. But that is not what
Paul says here.

He says something far more horrifying about God's wrath. He
gives us his analysis of our situation in four steps. Just take
verse 28 from today's text to see all four. First, he says that the
root problem is that we don't like having God in our knowledge.
"They did not see fit to acknowledge God." That is the fundamental
problem in the world. That is the essence of the human condition.
We don't want God. We want self-determination and self-exaltation.
That was the first sin in the garden. And that is the root of all
evil today. We do not want to know God or have him in our
lives.

The Depth of our Sin Is Divine Judgment

The second step of God's analysis is that God, in an act of
judgment (recall the revealing of "wrath" in verse 18) withdraws
his common restraints on our rebellion and gives us over to sink in
the swamp we have chosen. This is what you will not hear in any
social analysis today. Who today has the God-centered realism to
say: The depth of our sin does not just deserve divine judgment, it
is divine judgment? That is what Paul says. You can't really
understand America (or any other country) today without this
revealed truth. Even if we tried to boast over God that at least we
have our self-determination in rebelling against God, God would
answer: you think so? Think again.

The third step in Paul's analysis (in verse 28) is that the
effect of God's giving us over and removing his common restraints
(see Genesis 20:6) is that we are imprisoned by a "depraved mind."
"God gave them over to a depraved mind." Our minds become more and
more defective in sin. Not only do we use them to sin, but we can't
even think clearly about sin. We can't recognize it. It's as if we
turned away from God and fell in love with the African black fly
that carries the roundworm that causes river blindness, and then
God gave us over to the fly and the worm - and the blindness - so
that all we can do now is fondle the fly (of sin!) and keep trying
to convince ourselves that it's a precious tuft of velvet.

The fourth step of the analysis (in verse 28) is that our
defective mind produces all kinds of evils. Paul goes on to list
twenty-one of them as samples.

So now we have our answer to the first question, namely, where
does such evil come from? It comes from: 1) our desire not to have
God in our knowledge; and 2) from God's judgment on mankind to give
us over to sink in the swamp we love; and 3) from the depraved or
defective mind that we sink into.

What Is this List and Why Is it Here?

So now we can ask the question: What is this list of evils? What
are we to make of this long list and why is it here?

Let's read it again. Verse 28b-31: "God gave them over to a
depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being
filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of
envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers,
haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil,
disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy,
unloving, unmerciful."

Of course, a person could raise an objection against Paul here:
this is not the way all unbelievers are. Some are very
conscientious, law-abiding, philanthropic, courteous, decent
people. Yes, that's true, and Paul knew it was true. He was quite
aware, for example, of the Stoics of his own day - people like
Seneca and later, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, who prided
themselves in not being like this list of evils, and yet, who were
not Christians.

No, the point of this list is not to say that every society
which refuses to love the true God will look just like this. We
know this because, in verses 26-27, Paul says that homosexual
desire is also a result of not loving God above other things, and
being handed over by God, and yet Paul clearly does not think that
every unbeliever has homosexual desires. Similarly, here in verse
28-31, when he says that all these sins are the result of refusing
to acknowledge God, and he doesn't mean that every
unbeliever, or
group of unbelievers, has all these sins or in the same measure.
Instead, these are samples. They are the sort of thing that comes
from rejecting God, and the more God gives a people up to their own
unrestrained depravity, the more their society will have these sins
in greater and greater measure.

Every Form of Evil comes from Failing to Know God

So what's the point of listing all these sins? The point, I
think, is to give us enough examples to show that virtually every
form of evil has to do with God and comes from failing to know him
and approve him and love him above all things. In other words, he
gives us a sweeping array of evils to waken us to the fact that the
ruin of any area of life is owing to the abandonment of God. Verse
28: they did not want God in their knowledge, therefore . . . and
then he gives his list of evils.

In other words: the point of the list is to connect God with
every sin in the world. And we've seen that the connection is
twofold: every sin is rooted in our preferring something else to
God; and every sin gets worse as God takes away his restraints and
gives us up to sink in the swamp we have chosen.

If America has the highest murder rate in the western world, it
has to do with God. If our executives are greedy, it has to do with
God. If our politicians are deceitful, it has to do with God. If we
gossip about each other behind the back, it has to do with God. If
our talk show hosts are insolent and boastful, it has to do with
God. If our children are disobedient to parents, it has to do with
God. If we are untrustworthy and don't keep our marriage vows, it
has to do with God. If we are blind to obvious wrongs and are
unloving and unmerciful, it has to do with God.

That's the point of this list. Wherever we are sinking in sin,
it is because we have jumped off the rock of the glory of God.

How Shall We Battle these Destructive Evils?

Which brings us finally to the third and last question: What is
the solution? How shall we battle back against these destructive
evils in our own lives and in our culture?

The answer is what the whole book of Romans is about. But let's
close by looking at three great reversals. 1) We need the reversal
of God's wrath against our unrighteousness. 2) We need the reversal
of God's handing us over to a depraved mind. 3) We need the
reversal of our mind's moral decay so that it can be renewed for
right and proper use in God's service.

The good news is that God has provided every one of those
reversals. You do not have to sink any further if you will embrace
God and his provision. Here is the key verse for each of these
reversals.

The key verse for the reversal of God's wrath against us is
Romans 1:17: In the gospel of Christ, "the righteousness of God is
revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, 'The righteous
shall live by faith.'" In other words, the righteousness that God
demands from us, he freely gives to us, if we will turn back to him
and trust him to be our greatest Good. And if you have the
righteousness of God, you are not under the wrath of God any more.
A very happy reversal!

The key verse for the reversal of God's handing us over to a
depraved mind is Romans 6:17. "Thanks be to God that, though you
were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form
of teaching to which you were handed over [same word as Romans
1:28]." This is the exact reversal of the hand-over in Romans 1:28.
Here it is to a form of teaching that is true and holy, not false
and dirty. And notice that it is God who does it. "Thanks be to
God," Paul says, that you became obedient to this teaching. God
gives us over to truth and righteousness as much as he once gave us
over to sin.

Finally, the key verse for reversing the defectiveness of our
minds is Romans 12:2. "Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove
what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and
perfect."

When God has given us his righteousness by faith in Jesus, and
when he has handed us over to a new teaching of truth and begun to
make us obedient to it, then little by little we are transformed in
the renewing of our minds and the long list of sins in Romans
1:29-31 becomes shorter and weaker to the glory of God.

This is the key to life. This is the message that we take to the
neighborhood and to the nations. I call you and urge you to receive
these three reversals from the hand of God by faith: 1) the
reversal of God's wrath through the gift of God's righteousness; 2)
the reversal of being handed over to depravity through being handed
over to truth; and 3) the reversal of a depraved mind through the
transformation of a renewed mind.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

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